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Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Historical Figure: Hunt Lewis

The Civil War gallery of the Hampton
Roads Naval Museum (HRNM) has seen its share of changes as artifacts and
exhibits rotate in and out, but one of the longest-lasting staples of the Civil
War Gallery appears each Friday. Clad in
a Union Navy officer’s uniform, a figure gazes out as if from the deck of a
blockading ship just off the coast. Occasionally, visitors will sidle up to him
and even put their arms around him for photographs, only to jump, scream and run
away when the figure begins to move.

“A volunteer with the USS Midway Museum in San Diego once
approached me and was amazed that this museum had such a high quality mannequin
that people could actually touch,” said J. Huntington “Hunt” Lewis, a person as
real as you or I, but someone who magically becomes one with the gallery on the
three days a week he volunteers.

“An eight or nine-year-old girl
once pointed me out and said, ‘He’s a dead man, but somebody stuffed him.’”

Hunt Lewis pauses for a moment within the Civil War Gallery of the Hampton Roads Naval Museum, in his words, "55 years later and 154 years earlier" than when he first put on a naval uniform as a midshipman. (Photograph by M.C. Farrington)

Originally from Jacksonville,
Florida, Lewis has personified the past at HRNM for nearly 22 years.He began by portraying a merchant mariner of
Norfolk of the 1820s who could regale visitors of tales of life in Norfolk after
the incident between the American frigate Chesapeake
and the British warship Leopard before
the War of 1812. Lewis has also traveled
to schools throughout the area to give his first-person accounts of life at sea
during the age of sail.But as the decades
came and went, so did his characters, and about 8 years ago, he settled upon
his current persona, Lt. Cmdr. Thomas O. Selfridge, Jr., who was serving aboard
the ill-fated sloop-of-war Cumberland
on blockade duty when she was sunk by the Confederate ironclad Virginia.

In addition to his interpretive work
as a docent, Lewis has also worked as a volunteer educator for the museum,
bringing visitors, in his words, “behind the label plates.” He was one of the first to expose Norfolk’s elementary
school children to the popular Blacks in Blue program, which originally highlighted the role of
African-Americans in the Union Navy during the Civil War and since has been expanded to encompass all of U.S. Navy history. At the suggestion of HRNM Director Becky
Poulliot, he also originated and has authored over 400 installments of the
long-running “Moments in Naval History” series that has appeared in the local
Navy newspaper The Flagship for the past
15 years.

After a career as a naval officer
and then as a contractor overseeing ships’ selected record and technical
documentation specialists, Lewis did not set
out initially to do anything related to history, or even the Navy, in his retirement. That changed after he saw a flyer calling for
volunteers for the Hampton Roads Naval Museum, which was preparing to move from
Naval Station Norfolk to a larger venue downtown.

Lewis reckons that he is the last
alumnus of over 30 prospective docents who began training at the naval station’s
Pennsylvania House, the museum’s former home, in the spring of 1994. Technically, that would make him the last HRNM
plank owner among the docents still serving. In order to prepare for their roles at the
museum, the first docents had to use maps and descriptions of objects in place
of the real thing because the galleries at the museum’s new home within Nauticus, the National Maritime Center, did not yet exist.

It was during those early
training sessions he began building a notebook that he carries to this day,
filled with information about every vessel, hero, or battle featured in the museum’s
collection, although he has fully embraced digital
research and rarely leaves his mini-laptop at home. He also maintains a research library of around
400 books at his home to augment the titles carried in the museum’s library, from
which he has answered thousands of visitor queries over the years, and in so
doing he has cultivated contacts from as far away as Australia.

J. Huntington Lewis, USNA, 1961. (Courtesy Hunt Lewis)

Lewis demurs at the suggestion
that over his tenure he has amassed all the answers to any question a student
of local naval history could ask, saying instead that his greatest strength
lies not in being able to answer any question, but in knowing where to find the
answers and “attacking things from an oblique angle.” He credits the formative experiences
he had searching for the answers to endless dinnertime questions from
upperclassmen during his plebe year at the United States Naval Academy, from
which he graduated in 1961, spending hours in libraries scattered about Bancroft
Hall.

Lewis has earned “literally a
drawer full” of awards, said Tom Dandes, volunteer coordinator for the Hampton Roads
Naval Museum, including earning numerous Presidential Volunteer Service Awards, with
several of them being earned in a single year.He was recognized as Docent of the Year by VisitNorfolk in 2012, and during HRNM's annual volunteer appreciation dinner on
April 14 he will become only the third person to earn the museum's 10,000-hour service award.By comparison, a volunteer becomes eligible for the President’s Lifetime
Achievement Award after completing 4,000 hours of service.

Hunt Lewis describes the transformation of the frigate USS Merrimack into the Confederate ironclad Virginia to Trent Johnson and his daughter Jessica, who were visiting from South Dakota. (Photograph by M.C. Farrington)

“I almost become a different
person when I am out of the floor,” said Lewis.Socially, I’m rather retiring but on the floor you’d never think
it.Call that a matter of confidence.”

“I’ve been having more fun doing
this than most anything else I’ve done in my life.”